It’s nice to know that in this fast moving world we live in, you can start a public consultation into UK future energy needs in January 2006, three years after the relevant Energy White Paper is made legal. And it takes three months for a public consultation – hasn’t the British government heard of just generally asking people?

But I fear it’ll all be too long, too late. This article from former oilman Jeremy Leggett in The Independent goes beyond the usual cry of “we’re running out of oil!” to also point out that Russia’s gas supplies – usually exported to Western Europe – is being diverted back to Russia, just at a time when a chilly winter settles in across Northern Europe. It then goes on to talk about how crucial oil is to the world’s infrastructure – something like six barrels of oil to ensure that milk from a cow goes from farm to your doorstep – and how everyone has been wildly over-estimating the amount of oil in their reserves.

The author also points out that when times are tough – and with the era of cheap energy about to come to an abrupt end, that means tough times – people tend to listen far more to far-right ultra-nationalistic leaders. Although you could cynically argue that he has a book to promote.

There’s an even more doom-laden article from Gaia theoriest James Lovelock (who also has a book to promote. Don’t these people realise nobody reads books any more?) who suggests just how global warming will doom human civilisation to a “few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”

So that’s something to look forward to. Decades of social unrest and upheaval with far-right governments merrily invading and destroying in a desperate attempt to safeguard their own energy supplies (and probably destroying from within) before even those energies aren’t enough to safeguard what remains of civilised human behaviour and it’s just a bunch of breeding humans in the Arctic Circle.